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  1. Knowledge in Action.Jonathan Weisberg - 2013 - Philosophers' Imprint 13.
    Recent proposals that frame norms of action in terms of knowledge have been challenged by Bayesian decision theorists. Bayesians object that knowledge-based norms conflict with the highly successful and established view that rational action is rooted in degrees of belief. I argue that the knowledge-based and Bayesian pictures are not as incompatible as these objectors have made out. Attending to the mechanisms of practical reasoning exposes space for both knowledge and degrees of belief to play their respective roles.
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  2. Expected comparative utility theory: A new theory of instrumental rationality.David Robert - manuscript
    This paper aims to address the question of how one ought to choose when one is uncertain about what outcomes will result from one’s choices, but when one can nevertheless assign probabilities to the different possible outcomes. These choices are commonly referred to as choices (or decisions) under risk. I assume in this paper that one ought to make instrumentally rational choices—more precisely, one ought to adopt suitable means to one’s morally permissible ends. Expected utility (EU) theory is generally accepted (...)
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  3. The Future Has Thicker Tails than the Past: Model Error as Branching Counterfactuals.Nassim N. Taleb - manuscript
    Ex ante predicted outcomes should be interpreted as counterfactuals (potential histories), with errors as the spread between outcomes. But error rates have error rates. We reapply measurements of uncertainty about the estimation errors of the estimation errors of an estimation treated as branching counterfactuals. Such recursions of epistemic uncertainty have markedly different distributial properties from conventional sampling error, and lead to fatter tails in the projections than in past realizations. Counterfactuals of error rates always lead to fat tails, regardless of (...)
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  4. Can an evidentialist be risk-averse?Hayden Wilkinson - manuscript
    Two key questions of normative decision theory are: 1) whether the probabilities relevant to decision theory are evidential or causal; and 2) whether agents should be risk-neutral, and so maximise the expected value of the outcome, or instead risk-averse (or otherwise sensitive to risk). These questions are typically thought to be independent---that our answer to one bears little on our answer to the other. But there is a surprising argument that they are not. In this paper, I show that evidential (...)
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  5. What rationality is.Arif Ahmed -
    A choice function C is rational iff: if it allows a path through a sequence of decisions with a particular outcome, then that outcome is amongst the ones that C would have chosen from amongst all the possible outcomes of the sequence. This implies, and it is the strongest definition that implies, that anyone who is irrational could be talked out of their own preferences. It also implies weak but non-vacuous constraints on choices over ends. These do not include alpha (...)
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  6. Making decisions in large worlds (pdf 141k).Ken Binmore - manuscript
    This paper argues that we need to look beyond Bayesian decision theory for an answer to the general problem of making rational decisions under uncertainty. The view that Bayesian decision theory is only genuinely valid in a small world was asserted very firmly by Leonard Savage [18] when laying down the principles of the theory in his path-breaking Foundations of Statistics. He makes the distinction between small and large worlds in a folksy way by quoting the proverbs ”Look before you (...)
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  7. The Sure Thing Principle Leads to Instability.J. Dmitri Gallow - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Orthodox causal decision theory is unstable. Its advice changes as you make up your mind about what you will do. Several have objected to this kind of instability and explored stable alternatives. Here, I'll show that explorers in search of stability must part with a vestige of their homeland. There is no plausible stable decision theory which satisfies Savage's Sure Thing Principle. So those in search of stability must learn to live without it.
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  8. Know Your Way Out of St. Petersburg: An Exploration of "Knowledge-First" Decision Theory.Frank Hong - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-20.
    This paper explores the consequences of applying two natural ideas from epistemology to decision theory: (1) that knowledge should guide our actions, and (2) that we know a lot of non-trivial things. In particular, we explore the consequences of these ideas as they are applied to standard decision theoretic puzzles such as the St. Petersburg Paradox. In doing so, we develop a “knowledge-first” decision theory and we will see how it can help us avoid fanaticism with regard to the St. (...)
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  9. Rational Aversion to Information.Sven Neth - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Is more information always better? Or are there some situations in which more information can make us worse off? Good (1967) argues that expected utility maximizers should always accept more information if the information is cost-free and relevant. But Good's argument presupposes that you are certain you will update by conditionalization. If we relax this assumption and allow agents to be uncertain about updating, these agents can be rationally required to reject free and relevant information. Since there are good reasons (...)
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  10. Blame, punishment and intermediate options.Martin Smith - forthcoming - Edinburgh Law Review.
    In this paper I explore some ideas inspired by Federico Picinali’s Justice In-Between: A Study of Intermediate Criminal Verdicts. Picinali makes a case for the introduction of intermediate options in criminal trials – verdicts with consequences that are harsher than an acquittal, but not so harsh as a conviction. From a certain perspective, the absence of intermediate options in criminal trials is puzzling – out of kilter with much of our everyday decision-making and, perhaps, with the recommendations of expected utility (...)
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  11. How Should Risk and Ambiguity Affect Our Charitable Giving?Lara Buchak - 2023 - Utilitas 35 (3):175-197.
    Suppose we want to do the most good we can with a particular sum of money, but we cannot be certain of the consequences of different ways of making use of it. This article explores how our attitudes towards risk and ambiguity bear on what we should do. It shows that risk-avoidance and ambiguity-aversion can each provide good reason to divide our money between various charitable organizations rather than to give it all to the most promising one. It also shows (...)
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  12. Credal imprecision and the value of evidence.Nilanjan Das - 2023 - Noûs 57 (3):684-721.
    This paper is about a tension between two theses. The first is Value of Evidence: roughly, the thesis that it is always rational for an agent to gather and use cost‐free evidence for making decisions. The second is Rationality of Imprecision: the thesis that an agent can be rationally required to adopt doxastic states that are imprecise, i.e., not representable by a single credence function. While others have noticed this tension, I offer a new diagnosis of it. I show that (...)
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  13. Extrapolating from experiments, confidently.Donal Khosrowi - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (2):1-28.
    Extrapolating causal effects from experiments to novel populations is a common practice in evidence-based-policy, development economics and other social science areas. Drawing on experimental evidence of policy effectiveness, analysts aim to predict the effects of policies in new populations, which might differ importantly from experimental populations. Existing approaches made progress in articulating the sorts of similarities one needs to assume to enable such inferences. It is also recognized, however, that many of these assumptions will remain surrounded by significant uncertainty in (...)
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  14. Autonomy for Changing Selves.Richard Pettigrew - 2023 - In Ben Colburn (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Autonomy. London: Routledge.
    Our values change. What we value, want, desire, prefer, and how much; for nearly everyone, these will be different at different times in their life. These changes can be gradual or abrupt; they can be long-lasting or short-lived; and they can be induced by forces outside yourself or they can come from within or they can have no specific catalyst at all. Such preference change raises a number of questions for our theorising about rational choice, and these have been discussed (...)
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  15. Acting on belief functions.Nicholas J. J. Smith - 2023 - Theory and Decision 95 (4):575-621.
    The degrees of belief of rational agents should be guided by the evidence available to them. This paper takes as a starting point the view—argued elsewhere—that the formal model best able to capture this idea is one that represents degrees of belief using Dempster–Shafer belief functions. However degrees of belief should not only respect evidence: they also guide decision and action. Whatever formal model of degrees of belief we adopt, we need a decision theory that works with it: that takes (...)
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  16. A Plea for Plausibility: Toward a Comparative Decision Theory.John R. Welch - 2023 - London: Routledge.
    Human decisions are conditioned by formidable uncertainty. The standard resource for dealing rationally with uncertainty is the mathematical concept of probability. The probability calculus is well-known, but since the numerical demands for applying it cannot usually be met, it is not widely applicable. By contrast, the concept of plausibility is widely applicable, but it is little known. This book relies on a generalized concept of plausibility whose strength is its adaptability. The adaptability is due to a novel form of decision (...)
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  17. Rational Intransitive Preferences.Peter Baumann - 2022 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 21 (1):3-28.
    According to a widely held view, rationality demands that the preferences of a person be transitive. The transitivity assumption is an axiom in standard theories of rational choice. It is also prima facie very plausible. I argue here that transitivity is not a necessary condition of rationality; it is a constraint only in some cases. The argument presented here is based on the non-linearity of differential utility functions. This paper has four parts. First, I present an argument against the transitivity (...)
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  18. Escaping the Cycle.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2022 - Mind 131 (521):99-127.
    I present a decision problem in which causal decision theory appears to violate the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) and normal-form extensive-form equivalence (NEE). I show that these violations lead to exploitable behavior and long-run poverty. These consequences appear damning, but I urge caution. This decision should lead causalists to a better understanding of what it takes for a decision between some collection of options to count as a subdecision of a decision between a larger collection of options. And with (...)
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  19. Tough enough? Robust satisficing as a decision norm for long-term policy analysis.Andreas L. Mogensen & David Thorstad - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-26.
    This paper aims to open a dialogue between philosophers working in decision theory and operations researchers and engineers working on decision-making under deep uncertainty. Specifically, we assess the recommendation to follow a norm of robust satisficing when making decisions under deep uncertainty in the context of decision analyses that rely on the tools of Robust Decision-Making developed by Robert Lempert and colleagues at RAND. We discuss two challenges for robust satisficing: whether the norm might derive its plausibility from an implicit (...)
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  20. Expected utility theory on mixture spaces without the completeness axiom.David McCarthy, Kalle Mikkola & Joaquin Teruji Thomas - 2021 - arXiv:2102.06898 [Econ.TH].
    A mixture preorder is a preorder on a mixture space (such as a convex set) that is compatible with the mixing operation. In decision theoretic terms, it satisfies the central expected utility axiom of strong independence. We consider when a mixture preorder has a multi-representation that consists of real-valued, mixture-preserving functions. If it does, it must satisfy the mixture continuity axiom of Herstein and Milnor (1953). Mixture continuity is sufficient for a mixture-preserving multi-representation when the dimension of the mixture space (...)
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  21. A restatement of expected comparative utility theory: A new theory of rational choice under risk.David Robert - 2021 - Philosophical Forum 52 (3):221-243.
    In this paper, I argue for a new normative theory of rational choice under risk, namely expected comparative utility (ECU) theory. I first show that for any choice option, a, and for any state of the world, G, the measure of the choiceworthiness of a in G is the comparative utility (CU) of a in G—that is, the difference in utility, in G, between a and whichever alternative to a carries the greatest utility in G. On the basis of this (...)
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  22. Transformative Experiences.Marcus Arvan - 2020 - In International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Wiley-Blackwell.
  23. Accurate Updating for the Risk Sensitive.Catrin Campbell-Moore & Bernhard Salow - 2020 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (3):751-776.
    Philosophers have recently attempted to justify particular belief revision procedures by arguing that they are the optimal means towards the epistemic end of accurate credences. These attempts, however, presuppose that means should be evaluated according to classical expected utility theory; and there is a long tradition maintaining that expected utility theory is too restrictive as a theory of means–end rationality, ruling out too many natural ways of taking risk into account. In this paper, we investigate what belief-revision procedures are supported (...)
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  24. Avoiding Risk and Avoiding Evidence.Catrin Campbell-Moore & Bernhard Salow - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (3):495-515.
    It is natural to think that there is something epistemically objectionable about avoiding evidence, at least in ideal cases. We argue that this thought is inconsistent with a kind of risk-avoidance...
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  25. Newcomb University: A play in one act.Adam Elga - 2020 - Analysis 80 (2):212-221.
    Counter-intuitive consequences of both causal decision theory and evidential decision theory are dramatized. Each of those theories is thereby put under some pressure to supply an error theory to explain away intuitions that seem to favour the other. Because trouble is stirred up for both sides, complacency about Newcomb’s problem is discouraged.
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  26. Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism.Danny Frederick - 2020 - Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
    This book uses the concepts of freedom, indeterminism, and fallibilism to solve, in a unified way, problems of free will, knowledge, reasoning, rationality, personhood, ethics and politics. Presenting an overarching theory of human freedom, Frederick argues for an account of free will as the capacity for undetermined acts. Knowledge, rationality, and reasoning, both theoretical and practical, as well as personhood, morality and political authority, are all shown to be dependent at their roots on indeterminism and fallibility, and to be connected (...)
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  27. On the Individuation of Choice Options.Roberto Fumagalli - 2020 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 50 (4):338-365.
    Decision theorists have attempted to accommodate several violations of decision theory’s axiomatic requirements by modifying how agents’ choice options are individuated and formally represented. In recent years, prominent authors have worried that these modifications threaten to trivialize decision theory, make the theory unfalsifiable, impose overdemanding requirements on decision theorists, and hamper decision theory’s internal coherence. In this paper, I draw on leading descriptive and normative works in contemporary decision theory to address these prominent concerns. In doing so, I articulate and (...)
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  28. The Causal Decision Theorist's Guide to Managing the News.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2020 - Journal of Philosophy 117 (3):117-149.
    According to orthodox causal decision theory, performing an action can give you information about factors outside of your control, but you should not take this information into account when deciding what to do. Causal decision theorists caution against an irrational policy of 'managing the news'. But, by providing information about factors outside of your control, performing an act can give you two, importantly different, kinds of good news. It can tell you that the world in which you find yourself is (...)
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  29. The intrinsic value of risky prospects.Zeev Goldschmidt & Ittay Nissan-Rozen - 2020 - Synthese 198 (8):7553-7575.
    We study the representation of attitudes to risk in Jeffrey’s decision-theoretic framework suggested by Stefánsson and Bradley :602–625, 2015; Br J Philos Sci 70:77–102, 2017) and Bradley :231–248, 2016; Decisions theory with a human face, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017). We show that on this representation, the value of any prospect may be expressed as a sum of two components, the prospect’s instrumental value and the prospect’s intrinsic value. Both components have an expectational form. We also make a distinction between (...)
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  30. Structuring Decisions Under Deep Uncertainty.Casey Helgeson - 2020 - Topoi 39 (2):257-269.
    Innovative research on decision making under ‘deep uncertainty’ is underway in applied fields such as engineering and operational research, largely outside the view of normative theorists grounded in decision theory. Applied methods and tools for decision support under deep uncertainty go beyond standard decision theory in the attention that they give to the structuring of decisions. Decision structuring is an important part of a broader philosophy of managing uncertainty in decision making, and normative decision theorists can both learn from, and (...)
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  31. The Reality of Free Will.Claus Janew - 2020 - Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research 11 (1):1-16.
    The uniqueness of each standpoint, each point of effect, can only be "overcome" by the standpoint changing to other standpoints and returning. In such alternation, which can also appear as constant change, lies the unity of the world. The wholeness of an alternation, however, is a structure of consciousness due to the special relationship between the circumscribing periphery and the infinitesimal center. This process structure unites determinacy and indeterminacy also totally in every place. Therefore, everywhere we are dealing with forms (...)
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  32. Transformative experience and the knowledge norms for action: Moss on Paul’s challenge to decision theory.Richard Pettigrew - 2020 - In Becoming Someone New: Essays on Transformative Experience, Choice, and Change. New York, NY, USA:
    to appear in Lambert, E. and J. Schwenkler (eds.) Transformative Experience (OUP) -/- L. A. Paul (2014, 2015) argues that the possibility of epistemically transformative experiences poses serious and novel problems for the orthodox theory of rational choice, namely, expected utility theory — I call her argument the Utility Ignorance Objection. In a pair of earlier papers, I responded to Paul’s challenge (Pettigrew 2015, 2016), and a number of other philosophers have responded in similar ways (Dougherty, et al. 2015, Harman (...)
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  33. 群体选择和现象学的死手 - 赫伯特·金提斯357p (2017)对个性和纠缠的回顾(2019年修订版) (The Dead Hands of Group Selection and Phenomenology -- A Review of (Individuality and Entanglement) by Herbert Gintis 357p (2017)).Michael Richard Starks - 2020 - In 欢迎来到地球上的地狱: 婴儿,气候变化,比特币,卡特尔,中国,民主,多样性,养成基因,平等,黑客,人权,伊斯兰教,自由主义,繁荣,网络,混乱。饥饿,疾病,暴力,人工智能,战争. Las Vegas, NV USA: Reality Press. pp. 236-248.
    由于金蒂斯是一位资深经济学家,而且我饶有兴趣地阅读了他的一些以前的书,所以我期待对行为有更多的见解。可悲的是,他把群体选择和现象学的死手变成了他行为理论的核心,这在很大程度上使工作无效。更糟糕的是,由 于他在这里表现出了如此糟糕的判断,这就使他对以前的所有工作都提出了质疑。几年前,他在哈佛、诺瓦克和威尔逊的朋友试图重新选择团体,这是过去十年中生物学领域的重大丑闻之一,我在《利他主义、耶稣和世界末日》 一文中讲述了这个悲惨的故事——邓普顿·福 foundation 买下了哈佛大学教授职位,攻击了进化、理性和文明——对E.O.威尔逊的《地球的社会征服》(2012年)和诺瓦克和高菲尔德"超级合作者"(2012年)的回顾。与诺瓦克不同,金提人似乎并 非出于宗教狂热,而是强烈希望为人性的严峻现实创造一种替代方案,而(几乎普遍)缺乏对人类基本生物学的理解和空白石板主义的使之变得容易。行为科学家、其他学者和一般公众。 Gintis正确地攻击(正如他以前多次)经济学家、社会学家和其他行为科学家没有一个连贯的框架来描述行为。当然,理解行为所需的框架是一个进化的框架。不幸的是,他未能提供一个自己(根据他的许多批评家,我同 意),并试图嫁接腐烂的尸体的群体选择到任何经济和心理理论,他在他的几十年的工作,只是使他的整个项目无效。 虽然金蒂斯勇敢地努力去理解和解释遗传学,比如威尔逊和诺瓦克,但他远非专家,和他们一样,数学只是使他看不到生物学上的不可能性,当然这是科学的常态。正如维特根斯坦在《文化与价值》第一页中著名的指出的那样: "没有宗教派别滥用形而上学的表达方式像在数学中那样造成如此多的辛德。 一直很清楚,导致行为降低其自身频率的基因不能持久,但这是群体选择概念的核心。此外,众所周知,并经常证明,群体选择只是减少到包容性健身(亲属选择),正如道金斯指出,这只是另一个名字进化的自然选择。和威尔 逊一样,金蒂斯在这个舞台上工作了大约50年,但至今还没有掌握,但是丑闻爆发后,我只用了3天时间就找到、阅读和理解了最相关的专业工作,就像我的文章所详述的。想到金蒂斯和威尔逊在近半个世纪里未能实现这一点 ,这令人费解。 我讨论了群体选择和现象学的错误,这是学术界的常态,是几乎普遍不理解正在毁灭美国和世界的人性的特殊情况。 那些希望从现代两个系统的观点来看为人类行为建立一个全面的最新框架的人,可以查阅我的书《路德维希的哲学、心理学、Min d和语言的逻辑结构》维特根斯坦和约翰·西尔的《第二部》(2019年)。那些对我更多的作品感兴趣的人可能会看到《会说话的猴子——一个末日星球上的哲学、心理学、科学、宗教和政治——文章和评论2006-20 19年第3次(2019年)和自杀乌托邦幻想21篇世纪4日 (2019) .
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  34. Is risk aversion irrational? Examining the “fallacy” of large numbers.H. Orri Stefánsson - 2020 - Synthese 197 (10):4425-4437.
    A moderately risk averse person may turn down a 50/50 gamble that either results in her winning $200 or losing $100. Such behaviour seems rational if, for instance, the pain of losing $100 is felt more strongly than the joy of winning $200. The aim of this paper is to examine an influential argument that some have interpreted as showing that such moderate risk aversion is irrational. After presenting an axiomatic argument that I take to be the strongest case for (...)
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  35. Conflicting intentions: rectifying the consistency requirements.Hein Duijf, Jan Broersen & John-Jules Ch Meyer - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (4):1097-1118.
    Many philosophers are convinced that rationality dictates that one’s overall set of intentions be consistent. The starting point and inspiration for our study is Bratman’s planning theory of intentions. According to this theory, one needs to appeal to the fulfilment of characteristic planning roles to justify norms that apply to our intentions. Our main objective is to demonstrate that one can be rational despite having mutually inconsistent intentions. Conversely, it is also shown that one can be irrational despite having a (...)
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  36. Measuring Belief and Risk Attitude.Sven Neth - 2019 - Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 297:354–364.
    Ramsey (1926) sketches a proposal for measuring the subjective probabilities of an agent by their observable preferences, assuming that the agent is an expected utility maximizer. I show how to extend the spirit of Ramsey's method to a strictly wider class of agents: risk-weighted expected utility maximizers (Buchak 2013). In particular, I show how we can measure the risk attitudes of an agent by their observable preferences, assuming that the agent is a risk-weighted expected utility maximizer. Further, we can leverage (...)
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  37. The Dead Hands of Group Selection and Phenomenology -- A Review of Individuality and Entanglement by Herbert Gintis 357p (2017)(review revised 2019).Michael Starks - 2019 - In Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century -- Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization -- Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 4th Edition Michael Starks. Las Vegas, NV USA: Reality Press. pp. 364-376.
    Since Gintis is a senior economist and I have read some of his previous books with interest, I was expecting some more insights into behavior. Sadly, he makes the dead hands of group selection and phenomenology into the centerpieces of his theories of behavior, and this largely invalidates the work. Worse, since he shows such bad judgement here, it calls into question all his previous work. The attempt to resurrect group selection by his friends at Harvard, Nowak and Wilson, a (...)
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  38. What Is Risk Aversion?H. Orii Stefansson & Richard Bradley - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (1):77-102.
    According to the orthodox treatment of risk preferences in decision theory, they are to be explained in terms of the agent's desires about concrete outcomes. The orthodoxy has been criticised both for conflating two types of attitudes and for committing agents to attitudes that do not seem rationally required. To avoid these problems, it has been suggested that an agent's attitudes to risk should be captured by a risk function that is independent of her utility and probability functions. The main (...)
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  39. Decision and Intervention.Reuben Stern - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (4):783-804.
    Meek and Glymour use the graphical approach to causal modeling to argue that one and the same norm of rational choice can be used to deliver both causal-decision-theoretic verdicts and evidential-decision-theoretic verdicts. Specifically, they argue that if an agent maximizes conditional expected utility, then the agent will follow the causal decision theorist’s advice when she represents herself as intervening, and will follow the evidential decision theorist’s advice when she represents herself as not intervening. Since Meek and Glymour take no stand (...)
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  40. Equal Opportunity and Newcomb’s Problem.Ian Wells - 2019 - Mind 128 (510):429-457.
    The 'Why ain'cha rich?' argument for one-boxing in Newcomb's problem allegedly vindicates evidential decision theory and undermines causal decision theory. But there is a good response to the argument on behalf of causal decision theory. I develop this response. Then I pose a new problem and use it to give a new 'Why ain'cha rich?' argument. Unlike the old argument, the new argument targets evidential decision theory. And unlike the old argument, the new argument is sound.
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  41. Newcomb's Problem.Arif Ahmed (ed.) - 2018 - Cambridge University Press.
    Newcomb's Problem is a controversial paradox of decision theory. It is easily explained and easily understood, and there is a strong chance that most of us have actually faced it in some form or other. And yet it has proven as thorny and intractable a puzzle as much older and better-known philosophical problems of consciousness, scepticism and fatalism. It brings into very sharp and focused disagreement several long-standing philosophical theories on practical rationality, on the nature of free will, and on (...)
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  42. What decision theory provides the best procedure for identifying the best action available to a given artificially intelligent system?Samuel A. Barnett - 2018 - Dissertation, University of Oxford
    Decision theory has had a long-standing history in the behavioural and social sciences as a tool for constructing good approximations of human behaviour. Yet as artificially intelligent systems (AIs) grow in intellectual capacity and eventually outpace humans, decision theory becomes evermore important as a model of AI behaviour. What sort of decision procedure might an AI employ? In this work, I propose that policy-based causal decision theory (PCDT), which places a primacy on the decision-relevance of predictors and simulations of agent (...)
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  43. Success-First Decision Theories.Preston Greene - 2018 - In Arif Ahmed (ed.), Newcomb's Problem. Cambridge University Press. pp. 115–137.
    The standard formulation of Newcomb's problem compares evidential and causal conceptions of expected utility, with those maximizing evidential expected utility tending to end up far richer. Thus, in a world in which agents face Newcomb problems, the evidential decision theorist might ask the causal decision theorist: "if you're so smart, why ain’cha rich?” Ultimately, however, the expected riches of evidential decision theorists in Newcomb problems do not vindicate their theory, because their success does not generalize. Consider a theory that allows (...)
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  44. Influences on Primary Care Provider Imaging for a Hypothetical Patient with Low Back Pain.Hh le, Matt DeCamp, Amanda Bertram, Minal Kale & Zackary Berger - 2018 - Southern Journal of Medicine 12 (111):758-762.
    OBJECTIVE: How outside factors affect physician decision making remains an open question of vital importance. We sought to investigate the importance of various influences on physician decision making when clinical guidelines differ from patient preference. -/- METHODS: An online survey asking 469 primary care providers (PCPs) across four practice sites whether they would order magnetic resonance imaging for a patient with uncomplicated back pain. Participants were randomized to one of four scenarios: a patient's preference for imaging (control), a patient's preference (...)
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  45. Continuity and completeness of strongly independent preorders.David McCarthy & Kalle Mikkola - 2018 - Mathematical Social Sciences 93:141-145.
    A strongly independent preorder on a possibly in finite dimensional convex set that satisfi es two of the following conditions must satisfy the third: (i) the Archimedean continuity condition; (ii) mixture continuity; and (iii) comparability under the preorder is an equivalence relation. In addition, if the preorder is nontrivial (has nonempty asymmetric part) and satisfi es two of the following conditions, it must satisfy the third: (i') a modest strengthening of the Archimedean condition; (ii') mixture continuity; and (iii') completeness. Applications (...)
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  46. Transformative Decisions.Kevin Reuter & Michael Messerli - 2018 - Journal of Philosophy 115 (6):313-335.
    Some decisions we make—such as becoming a parent or moving to a different part of the world—are transformative. According to L. A. Paul, transformative decisions pose a major problem to us because they fall outside the realm of rationality. Her argument for that conclusion rests on the premise that subjective value is central in transformative decisions. This paper challenges that premise and hence the overall conclusion that transformative decisions usually are not rational. In the theoretical part of the paper, we (...)
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  47. Expected Comparative Utility Theory: A New Theory of Rational Choice.David Robert - 2018 - Philosophical Forum 49 (1):19-37.
    In this paper, I argue for a new normative theory of rational choice under risk, namely expected comparative utility (ECU) theory. I first show that for any choice option, a, and for any state of the world, G, the measure of the choiceworthiness of a in G is the comparative utility (CU) of a in G—that is, the difference in utility, in G, between a and whichever alternative to a carries the greatest utility in G. On the basis of this (...)
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  48. Counterfactual Desirability.Richard Bradley & H. Orii Stefansson - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (2):485-533.
    The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes generate a class of problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais Paradox. In this paper we solve these problems by extending Richard Jeffrey's decision theory to counterfactual prospects, using a multidimensional possible-world semantics for conditionals, and showing that preferences that are sensitive to counterfactual considerations can still be desirability maximising. We (...)
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  49. Normative theories of rational choice: expected utility.Rachael Briggs - 2017 - The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  50. The Sure-thing Principle and P2.Yang Liu - 2017 - Economics Letters 159:221-223.
    This paper offers a fine analysis of different versions of the well known sure-thing principle. We show that Savage's formal formulation of the principle, i.e., his second postulate (P2), is strictly stronger than what is intended originally.
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